Machine translations involve the translation of information from a source language to a destination language via a computing device. Machine translations may be used to translate, for example, advertisements, government documents, academic works, text messages and emails, social networking posts, recordings of spoken language, and numerous other works.
Under certain circumstances, machine translation systems may introduce problematic language. For example, text in a source language may contain no objectionable material, but when subjected to machine translation objectionable material may be incorporated into the translation.
The translation system may introduce objectionable language for a number of reasons. For instance, the translation system may employ a translation model that incorrectly maps a source word in the source language to an objectionable destination word in the destination language. Thus, when the source word is translated, the translation system may incorrectly translate the source word into the objectionable destination word. Furthermore, in cases where training data is collected automatically, mined translations might not be exact and may differ in their use of explicit terms. Moreover, the translated destination word or phrase may mean the same thing as the source word or phrase, but may be an explicit or profane version of that source word or phrase—by way of illustration, the expression “Oh, no!” could be translated a number of different ways, some of which may use profane language.
Still further, machine translation systems are sometimes trained using human-translated source/destination word or phrase pairs. Human translators may ignore explicit words or phrases (or may soften them) when preparing these translations, which can result in half of the word/phrase pair having explicit content while the other half lacks explicit content.
The original speaker is likely to be offended and feel misrepresented if a machine translation introduces objectionable language into a translation. Particularly if the machine translation is offered as a service, it is important to prevent the translation system from automatically introducing objectionable words or phrases into a translation.